Poetry, the reading revolution and Mr Penry-Jones

Today we’re at the end of St John’s Gospel so here’s my last poem on that:

Meditation 208

In the flesh
there are no borders

and in the blood
and spirit and memory

there are so
many words

that the whole world
cannot hold them.

Tomorrow, it’s Acts – so hang on to your hats as we dive into that action-packed drama and angst …

At work, I’m actually doing quite well on my information gathering project – I’m rootling through the undergrowth with my trusty machete, and the tigers haven’t yet torn me limb from limb. So there’s hope, Carruthers, hope … I’m also attempting to sort out some upcoming meetings, but as it’s August and most of the academic staff are therefore sunning themselves in Majorca or Barbados, my hopes there aren’t quite as high. Still, by next week, we’ll be truly into autumn and it’ll be as if the summer pause never happened at all. Though actually, it didn’t for us. And probably not for the academic staff either. Ah well.

But this morning’s great excitement was the fire alarm going off. What fun. We all left the building beautifully and it wasn’t raining, hurrah. Nice to get out of the office once in a while en masse. There wasn’t actually a fire either, which is even better. I also managed to squeeze in a quick lunch & a cappuccino (hurrah!) with Jennifer – hello, Jennifer! Great to catch up and in just over an hour (naughty me …) we managed to put the literary world to rights. Jennifer’s Great Plan is that if we find a book that’s badly written (Sasha Wagstaff’s dreadful book, Changing Grooms, springs at once to mind, alas), or with dull characters and a ridiculous plot (um, ditto), we should mark up the errors and send it back to the publisher to say that the quality of the product falls below an acceptable legal standard and we should therefore have our money back. Honestly, it’s not a bad plan at all – and if everyone did it, then maybe publishers would begin to think twice about accepting substandard work for their lists. One can but hope. The reading revolution starts here …

Tonight, I’m pondering the edit of Hallsfoot’s Battle once more, though I mustn’t miss a new version of The 39 Steps on TV tonight, with the really quite scrumptious Rupert Penry-Jones. Whom I hadn’t really cottoned on to before, never having seen Spooks, but who swept me away in the glorious crime series, Whitechapel. Mmm, can’t wait …